Good leaders are good coaches. Coaches don’t just provide answers. They help people grow and develop while contributing to the organization. This article provides some tips and tricks for being a more effective coach.

You have three main roles as a coach:

Diagnosis: determining when/where people may need help

Creating Awareness: helping people see that they need help

Enablement: guiding people to the tools and resources they need to move on

Executing Your Role
There are five areas in which you can provide coaching support:

Process: people are doing the wrong tasks or are doing tasks out of order

Information: people are misusing information (e.g., wrong information, too little information, too much information, etc.)

Decisions: people are making the wrong decisions or do not know what decisions to make

Conclusions: people are drawing the wrong conclusions

Teamwork: people are not working together effectively

Routinely assess your team’s performance in each of these areas to determine if they need your support.

Instead of just giving people the answer, there are several tools that you can use to help people identify and work through their problems:

Specify: have people explain in specific, concrete terms an issue, design idea, or decision they make

Extrapolate: challenge people to think several steps ahead as to the results and impacts of their current decisions

Audit: have people explain their assumptions, interim conclusions, resources, etc.

Expand: suggest alternative ideas, explanations, theories, or designs and have people refute them

Reflect: have people discuss their processes and how well they are working within them

Assess: make a judgment about people’s decisions or actions

Refer: suggest external resources that the team can consult (books, articles, experts, etc.)

To help people learn focus on their thinking, not their products/deliverables. This is not to say that deliverables are unimportant. Rather you should make sure that people are really learning. This is especially true when they do things “right” as well. They might have just gotten lucky.

Providing Multiple Levels of Support
Teams that receive too much support do not get an opportunity to explore and learn. Teams that get too little support will flounder and become frustrated. When determining how much support to provide consider the following process:

1. Determine if your teams recognize that a problem or issue exists. The teams might have all of the information they need to fix the problem but maybe just don’t recognize it.
2. Once you know that the team recognizes the problem, see if they recognize its cause. Again, they may have all of the information to respond but just need prompting as to the situation.
3. Determine if your team knows how to respond to the problem.

Conclusion
As a leader you have to balance competing priorities. On one hand your job is to get results. On the other hand, your job is to grow and develop a workforce that can get results. By focusing on your coaching skills, you can accomplish both.